If you want to build a successful network marketing business, the one skill you should seek before all others is the ability to build relationships. The hierarchy of power that structures organizations in the traditional business paradigms does not exist here. No one works for anyone else. In a sense, Network marketing is ‘cooperative’ marketing – we work together from self-interest. For a system like this to be effective, it must be founded on solid win-win relationships.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

i. The foundation of a profitable business culture is characterized by a robust spirit of collaboration between:

Employees and management,

Internal departments or divisions, and

The organization, its customers and its suppliers.

ii. A collaborative environment best enables staff to align their professional goals with the objectives of the organization and to implement strategies and tactics to realize these objectives.

iii. In order for a knowledge management strategy to be successful, it must include a strategy for collaboration.

iv. The Internet and the World Wide Web provide a powerful paradigm of collaboration for any organization.

v. There are cognitive, emotional and motivational dimensions to collaboration.

vi. There are a number of tools and processes that help develop a culture and psychological environment of collaboration.

vii. A unique assessment instrument, the Collaboration Quotient, measures the readiness of individuals and their organization to collaborate. This tool is also used to monitor the organization’s progress in developing collaboration.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Why don’t highly effective people always run successful organizations? And why aren’t all successful organizations run by highly effective people?

We have all seen successful organizations being run by people who don’t come close to being highly effective, whilst people we know to be highly effective sometimes work in unremarkable, underperforming companies.

What is going on then?

The answer lies not in re-examining the laws that govern personal effectiveness but in reviewing the similarities and intrinsic differences between highly effective people and organizations. So where do we start?

We know that highly effective people:

o Control all decision-making from one place – their brain;

o Coordinate thought and action centrally in their brain and can make their mouth, hands, feet and everything in between do what they want when they want;

o Have a single mouthpiece; and

o Are driven by a single social paradigm – the character ethic.

Organizations, on the other hand:

o Have multiple decision-making points and use multiple decision-making criteria:

o Cannot centrally control every aspect of their operation;

o Struggle to send uncorrupted messages from the center outwards and are often unable to receive incoming messages from distant parts of the organization at all;

o Are driven by a variety of conflicting influences;

o May try and influence behavior through corporate values without defining and weighting underlying motivations, failing to make them either relevant or meaningful to anyone apart from the team that created them;

o Are unlikely to be able to manage relationships in a consistent manner without making a determined effort to do so; and

o May have a leadership team covertly hostile to each other’s motivations, beliefs, individual social paradigms and ideas about corporate culture.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

A working culture is the way an organization shapes its values, identity, behavior and relationships, in the same way that a social paradigm conditions the character, personality, behavior and attitudes of an individual.

It determines the way an organization interprets everything it sees and touches, the organization’s self-image and branding, and the attitude to its employees, customers, partners, competitors and the society and environment which it operates.

o Working culture works in a similar way to social paradigms but involves the control of multiple inputs and multiple outputs.

o It is applicable only in the context of the organization’s specific purpose.

o It controls the conduct of the organization as a whole and any individual personally representing the organization.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

If social paradigms are crucial to our development, growth and prosperity, how do they fit with concepts that we are more familiar with such as our personality and character?

Social paradigm: a set of principles for interpreting and judging how people should act and interact.

Character: the basic qualities and values that determine an individual’s behavior and attitudes.

Personality: the expression of an individual’s character and principles through their behavior, attitudes, emotional responses, relationships and interests.

Which together means that the social paradigm we inherit or adopt as we grow up is our model for interpreting and judging how people should act and interact. It conditions our basic character, which in turn determines our behavior, attitudes, emotional responses, relationships and interests, which we express through our personality.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Leader-driven change is more suitable for small and medium enterprises with owner-managers. This approach works well when the manager or leader has all the necessary information and knowledge. Leader-driven changes tend to be directive and non-participative. Therefore this approach is less suitable when: a) the workforce is young and/or highly skilled, b) the business environment is complex and dynamic, and c) successful change requires active involvement of a number of people in the organization.

Process-driven changes are led by experts or outside consultants and supported by the leader; these changes are more common in large, bureaucratic organizations. This approach works well when the change requires technical or specialized expertise. Also being directive and non-participative, as in the case of leader-driven approach, this approach is therefore less suitable when: a) the workforce is young and/or highly skilled, b) the business environment is complex and dynamic, and c) successful change requires active involvement of a number of people in the organization.

Team-driven approaches are most common in large, manufacturing enterprises that have skilled and educated employees. Change management strategies—such as TQM, Quality Circles, and Six Sigma—exemplify this approach. These are highly participative change efforts that empower employees and provide them with involvement, participation and ownership of change. Team-based approaches that are properly executed can unleash enormous levels of employee energy and motivation. This can, in turn, lead to innovation and productivity gains. However, using this approach can also cause some discomfort for managers in an organization because they may not be used to sharing their power and authority with workers. Moreover, this approach requires managers to shift from a directive, authoritarian style based on power and expertise to a participative style based on persuasion, coaching and helping. More importantly, the team-based approach to execute change requires the establishment of a ‘parallel organization.’

The fourth approach to change is called the Change Management approach. This is a combination of expert-driven and team-driven approaches. Whereas the former provides a business and technical focus to change, the latter generates ownership, involvement and commitment. So as to gain this commitment, most specialists, experts and change management consultants have incorporated the parallel organization concept in their process-driven approach. The Change Management paradigm is the approach to change that most organizations use today. Although it seemingly seeks to integrate ownership of change with practical business focus, the Change Management approach has shortcomings. Instead of involvement and commitment, this approach breeds cynicism, bureaucracy and resistance. It actually disempowers employees, by reinforcing hierarchical top-down management.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Lectures, Line of Sight

This phase is really a process of moving from awareness to commitment, especially among the key managers who must prepare to drive the rest of the organization. The aim here is to convince key people that a great opportunity—or looming problems—lies ahead and that radical thinking around a new paradigm is necessary to make real progress. All the work a company does during this phase—reckoning where it stands competitively on time-based performance, building a vision, and deciding how to proceed—is preparation for the big moves to follow. Some changes in how the company works occur naturally in this phase—good analysis always produces some early obvious action steps. But the real purpose of this phase is to build commitment to a new way of looking at the competitive game and how the managers must play it.

Reckoning where the company stands includes looking hard at its own current performance and direction in relation to what the best companies are doing and what the near future will surely bring. So the process has both an internal and an external analytic component. The internal part involves putting together moving pictures of how the company actually works in time—how it processes information, manages projects, moves materials, engages customers, and so on, and how all this is influenced by the firm’s briefs, practices, policies, and systems. The external part involves describing what customers what now and how they would be served ideally, and pacing together moving pictures of how the best time-based competitors operate. Together these two parts allow management to self-discover in concrete fashion the new time-based paradigm and the capabilities the company must build to gain control of it.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight